Notes on Vision Pro

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Vision%20Pro

by firloop • 3 years ago

577 684 3 years ago

notes.andymatuschak.org

xivusr• 3 years ago

Great notes and I really liked his idea of large persistent info spaces and sharing those with others.

gnicholas12• 3 years ago

Given how ambitious the hardware package is, the software paradigm is surprisingly conservative.

I actually see this as a bit less surprising. After all, if you change the hardware in a big way, and you change the software in a big way, users will have a harder time adjusting to the new platform. Instead, they're making a big leap on the hardware side, keeping legacy apps and concepts, and then will presumably iterate to more 'native' experiences that were previously impossible/unimaginable/unintuitive.

stephc_int13• 3 years ago

Text is still a large part of the interfaces we use.

We are all highly trained to read text, it seems basic but it is in practice quite abstract.

Text is still best read on a flat surface.

The great innovation I can see with this new Apple device is eye tracking, they have not invented it, but they might have perfected it enough to be useable.

Eyes could be better than a mouse.

roblh• 3 years ago

Yeah, if their eye tracking plus foveated rendering works as advertised, it could be a huge step forward. I'm really curious how responsive the gesture controls will be too, it was really cool seeing the finger pinches(?) being used as an input method. I wonder if it's specifically designed just for that thing or if it's all built out to track any arbitrary hand gesture accurately. And I wonder what the language/api for describing hand gestures would even look like.

Gigachad2• 3 years ago

Eye tracking is almost certainly more accurate and faster. To the point where we make it an entire game to see who can who can move the mouse to what their eyes are already looking at fastest, in the form of shooter games.

gutnor• 3 years ago

That was repeated a bunch of time during the keynote: "familiar"

balaji14• 3 years ago

In the demo, I was hoping to see some app/screen/display anchored to certain walls or being fixed in a 3D spot. That way I can walk to a place to see that "screen".

endisneigh4• 3 years ago

Isn’t that an intractable problem without LiDAR? I suppose the naive solution would be to fix the screens in spots as you suggest as opposed to pinning onto real life locations.

edit: ah, right the vision pro does have lidar. I look forward to seeing this pinning if it's implemented. I'm still skeptical it would work well - I've used ARKit and it's not really that accurate when you're moving around.

lagrange77• 3 years ago

In the demo there is a scene where a guy displays some iceberg photo on a virtual screen and then moves closer to it, with the screen anchored to some 3D point in the real world.

prawn3• 3 years ago

I think they'll inevitably introduce this down the track. The idea that you can set up a workspace as fixed to a particular place. Sit on the couch, and by default it has media apps and a big screen. Put it on in your office, and you can cover the walls with reference drawings and appropriate apps that are all where you left them.

gnicholas12• 3 years ago

PSA: this page only scrolls if your mouse is on the left side.

acherion• 3 years ago

Good thing my browser settings are to show scrollbars all the time!

gnicholas12• 3 years ago

Interestingly 'meta' given that Andy talks about the disappearance of interactivity cues that happened about a decade back...

recursive• 3 years ago

Firefox reader mode works well here.

gnicholas12• 3 years ago

Brave's reader mode wasn't shown as an option, though my BeeLine Reader extension was able to parse the text when I invoked its Clean Mode. I was a little surprised, since the BeeLine extension didn't detect/color the text inline, like it usually does.

bmacho• 3 years ago

Windows works the same (for me at least), scrolling follows the cursor (but input does not).

russellbeattie4• 3 years ago

But it does put an enormous amount of pressure on the eye tracking. As far as I can tell so far, the role of precise 2D control has been shifted to the eyes.

I've been researching eye tracking for my own project for the past year. I have a Tobii eye tracker which is probably the best eye tracking device for consumers currently (or the only one really). It's much more accurate than trying to repurpose a webcam.

The problem with eye tracking in general is what's called the "midas touch" problem. Everything you look at is potentially a target. If you were to simply connect your mouse pointer to your gaze, for example, any sort of hover effect on a web page would be activated simply by glancing at it. [1]

Additionally, our eyes are constantly making small movements call saccades [2]. If you track eye movement perfectly, the target will wobble all over the screen like mad. The ways to alleviate this are by expanding the target visually so that the small movements are contained within a "bubble" or by delaying the targeting slightly so the movements can be smoothed out. But this naturally causes inaccuracy and latency. [3] Even then, you can easily get a headache from the effort of trying to fixate your eyes on a small target (trust me). Though Apple is making an effort to predict eye movements to give the user the impression of lower latency and improve accuracy, it's an imperfect solution. Simply put, gazing as an interface will always suffer from latency and unnatural physical effort. Until computers can read our minds, that isn't going to change.

Apple decided to incorporate desktop and mobile apps into the device, so it seems this was really their only choice, as they need the equivalent of a pointer or finger to activate on-screen elements. They could do this with hand tracking, but then there's the issue of accuracy as well as clicking, tapping, dragging or swiping - plus the effort of holding your arms up for extended periods.

I think it's odd that they decided that voice should not be part of the UI. My preference would be hand tracking a virtual mouse/trackpad (smaller and more familiar movements) plus a simple, "tap" or "swipe" spoken aloud, with the current system for "quiet" operation. But Apple is Apple, and they insist on one way to do things. They have a video of using Safari and it doesn't look particularly efficient/practical to me [4].

But who knows - I haven't tried it yet, maybe Apple's engineers nailed it. I have my doubts.

1. https://uxdesign.cc/the-midas-touch-effect-the-most-unknown-...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade

3. https://help.tobii.com/hc/en-us/articles/210245345-How-to-se...

4. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10279/

ketzo• 3 years ago

From reading/listening to reports of people who were able to demo the device, I think Apple may have nailed it, or come close. Everyone I've seen has absolutely raved about how accurate and intuitive the eye tracking + hand gesture feels.

beoberha• 3 years ago

I just went to echo this. Most of the reviews I’ve watched or read have raved about the eye tracking, regardless of if the reviewer was a fan of VR in general. It feels really cool that we might finally have a new computing paradigm. There is so much potential here and I can’t wait to see where things go.

WhatIsDukkha• 3 years ago

The eye tracking as the interface is what stood out to me as the most radical choice in the device.

I'm doubtful we really know how good it is yet. Without a few hours/days of hard use its just not going to be obvious the degree to which they've overcome all these long standing obstacles via "magic".

It's hard to think voice is anywhere near ready for this application, I still find it highly frustrating after decades of tries.

MBCook9• 3 years ago

Heads up: PSVR2 has eye tracking, I know it’s used in some games. Might be something to look into.

kllrnohj• 3 years ago

PSVR2 uses it for foveated rendering where the eye tracking doesn't really have to be that precise. It's done for performance optimization, not input controls.

mcintyre19944• 3 years ago

If you were to simply connect your mouse pointer to your gaze, for example, any sort of hover effect on a web page would be activated simply by glancing at it.

I’m curious about how they deal with apparently not doing this, in terms of how do you know what button is going to be clicked if you click? The product page under privacy says that websites and apps don’t get eye tracking data, only knowing when you click, so I guess that means a website won’t display its active/hover effects on a button you’re looking at. Because if it could then it could just link that to analytics in JavaScript and defeat that privacy protection. So if you don’t have that, how do I actually know what’s going to happen when I click?

ask_b123• 3 years ago

I’m sure the info. is in one of the WWDC videos, but I imagine the hover effect could be activated by the OS without notifying the webpage.

pzo• 3 years ago

You have those problems mostly because your Tobii is external device much more far away - you won't get good enough accuracy comparing to any eye tracking that is just a camera few cm far away from your eyes.

With Apple solution (or any VR with eye tracking):

1. You have very accurate head 6d location (gyroscope, compass, accelerometer + lidar for translation) at 100+ fps minimum and very computationally cheaply without much latency

2. Cameras pointing at each eye from distance of few centimeters. In this situation Eye region of interest occupy full image resolution. Probably even VGA resolution (or less) is enough to have very accurate precision in this case

3. Because headset covers your face you don't have any problem with different lightning condition, cluttered background, whats more they use IR floodlight to have consistent lighting of pupils

4. Possibly they even use similar Truedepth IR dot pattern to get 3d depthmap of your pupils similar like truedepth sensor works with difference that here they can put thos camera more far away and have it more accurate disparity map

5. Who knows maybe they even use lidar instead of truedepth for even lower latency

6. Because sensors are so close they can have very accurate reconstruction of your eyes and distance between them - most people don't have completely symmetric eye/face

Tobii is a sensor that is just like 0.5m far away from your face. Has to track your head, estimate orientation and distance, and detected eye ROI will be a tiny crop of their image sensor even if they camera has 4K resolution (which I doubt they use such resolution). At that distance if you want to get accuracy of 1 cm of what you are looking at screen you need to detect pupil movement of ~1 degree angle. If you want even better accuracy without gitter like 1mm then you need to detect movement of pupils of 0.1 degree angle.

russellbeattie4• 3 years ago

Interesting. You might be right. I'll have to try it and see.

zmmmmm5• 3 years ago

Interesting notes.

I'm disappointed even though it's entirely predictable that VisionOS is built on the iOS/iPadOS foundation rather than OSX. I guess we'll see how "walled in" it is but it's hard to see any reason Apple isn't going to be just as constraining and controlling about what happens on this OS as they are on iOS, if not more so. Which ultimately means I'll be very reluctant to ever adopt it in any meaningful way as my primary computing device.

kfarr2• 3 years ago

Definitely pros and cons. I remember reading that because of the tight integration with iOS this allowed them to achieve best in class latency for iPad + pencil that couldn't be achieved on any other platform. Having followed Oculus / Quest development that low latency is not optional in this context and every millisecond counts so I can see why they would go this route.

On the other hand, the closed ecosystem is definitely cause for concern. Fingers crossed that WebXR support comes out from behind a feature flag to allow for progressive (spatial) web apps.

atchoo• 3 years ago

best in class latency for iPad + pencil

Hmm. Marketing horse-puckey.

A 2018 Dell XPS that has a Wacom digitiser and OneNote gives me lower latency and better inking experience than an iPad and pencil 2. I used them side by side for long-form writing for a while and the iPad was left in the dust.

wahnfrieden• 3 years ago

Be more specific what you mean by building on "OSX". AppKit is very old and crusty. Why would they build on AppKit? You want that?

zmmmmm5• 3 years ago

Ultimately its more about the openness of the OS. If they built on iPadOS but they made a reasonable experience for freely sideloading apps, I'd be OK with it. Or even if they support WebXR really well, I might (just) find a way to be OK with that. But if they lock this down and position themselves as rentseekers to take a cut from every piece of software that runs there regardless of how much they contributed to it - I'm out.

bodge5000• 3 years ago

Yeh this was my main thought. However good the hardware is doesn't matter if the software can't fully utilise it. The idea of virtual displays (the most obvious immediate benefit of Vision imo) for MacOS seems like a huge benefit, but for iPadOS its downgraded to pretty cool. I've never felt any particular need to add multiple displays to my iPad, and whilst a big display would be nice, I wouldn't describe it as groundbreaking (especially as others such as XReal are already doing this in a much smaller form factor).

throw747759• 3 years ago

This might have made sense with the iPad but I can't see how anyone is going to write software that 'fully utilizes' the system in a way that Apple doesn't support without billions of dollars of investment.

SamuelAdams• 3 years ago

I also wonder if it made more sense from a security perspective. In the early iOS days, one of the big problems for desktop apps was unrestricted access to your data. IOS improved this with application sandboxing by default, and it eventually made its way into OS X.

But we all know the difference between implementing something brand new versus retrofitting something into an existing system. So my guess is iOS had more secure defaults for a system like vision.

mikenew4• 3 years ago

It's a bit odd if you think about it: a desktop OS effectively creates a virtual 3d space for windows to live (move them in X and Y, or change their depth relative to each other), and the iPad or iPhone treats the surface as just a simple 2d plane with no depth or really even XY axes (you could sort of argue that the app switcher is an X axis).

So they're effectively recreating a lot of the elements of the macOS w/r/t window positioning, resizing, and depth, but building all on top of the iPadOS paradigm. If you consider the input methods are probably closer to a touch interface than a MKB interface then it kinda makes sense.

Personally I have zero interest whatsoever in living inside Apple's "only what we allow you to do" world, and the fact that they seem to be expanding it to what seems like a very powerful, desktop replacement computing device is kinda gross to me. But from an interface standpoint I think it's really interesting and actually makes some sense.

eyelidlessness2• 3 years ago

I'm disappointed even though it's entirely predictable that VisionOS is built on the iOS/iPadOS foundation rather than OSX.

They’re the same foundation, iOS is a fork of OS X and was originally announced as such. I’d be shocked if there isn’t a well maintained internal build of iOS which keeps parity with macOS windowing etc.

The difference in restrictions between the platforms is entirely arbitrary. If this device appeals to Mac users or would-be Mac users, I’d be shocked if it doesn’t at least eventually allow a Mac-like environment.

astrange4• 3 years ago

It certainly isn't arbitrary, macOS has swap and doesn't kill apps and iOS doesn't have swap and does kill apps. This makes everything very different, and one makes it easier to do real-time rendering than the other.

TX81Z9• 3 years ago

Also it’s locked to Siri which is dogshit and falling further behind by the second. Apples speech to text is atrocious, the OpenAI tools blow it out of the water, as does Google’s.

No matter how fancy the visuals, it’s hard to have a pseudo-hands free voice interface that doesn’t uh, work?

macintux2• 3 years ago

It has to be evident to Apple that Siri needs dramatic changes. They keep building hardware that needs robust voice support.

dilap2• 3 years ago

if i understood the wwdc keynote correctly, they completely redid the text-to-speech, so this should actually be good now (maybe)

Aeolun2• 3 years ago

As far as I know, Intellij doesn’t run on iPad, so they’ll need to fix that problem before I consider adopting one.

Though I do remember reading you can connect it to your mac, so who knows. You’ll just need 2 $2000+ devices instead of one.

pazimzadeh• 3 years ago

Yeah it kind of sucks because it seems like won't be able to use something like Hammerspoon to control windows and other UI elements the same way you can on Mac.

JohnBooty5• 3 years ago

    But it does put an enormous amount of pressure 
    on the eye tracking. As far as I can tell so 
    far, the role of precise 2D control has been 
    shifted to the eyes.

I've got one good eye and one bad eye. The bad eye is legally blind, has an off-center iris and is kind of lazy w.r.t. tracking.

I'm extremely curious to know how Vision Pro deals with this. One certainly hopes there's some kind of "single eye" mode; certainly seems possible with relatively small effort and the % of the population who'd benefit seems fairly significant.

Eye tracking most certainly sounds like the way to go, relative to hand-waving.

The Minority Report movie probably set the industry back by a decade or two. Waving your hands around to control stuff seems logical but is quickly exhausting.

miketery• 3 years ago

Track record wise, apple is one of the best in terms of serving accessibility. So I’d bet greater than 50% odds that they’re thinking about lazy eye or one eye or derivatives there of.

gnicholas12• 3 years ago

It would have been much less exciting to see Tom Cruise sitting on a couch, hands in his lap, gently flicking his fingers to scroll through crime scene footage. IIRC he talked about how tired his arms got during filming.

EDIT: found it — he didn't talk about it, but it was reported that he had to frequently rest his arms: https://medium.com/@LeapMotion/taking-motion-control-ergonom...

atleastoptimal• 3 years ago

Yeah, Tom Cruise doesn't seem like the type of person to admit he would need to rest his arms.

JohnBooty5• 3 years ago

Oh, 100%. The interfaces in Minority Report were spectacular in terms of cinematic movie appeal.

Artistically it was a great choice, and they certainly weren't intending to inspire a bunch of wrong-thinking UI choices in the real world.

gcr• 3 years ago

I have pendulum nystagmus since birth. My eyes saccade and shake very rapidly, even when I'm focused on something. Folks who talk with me certainly notice.

I really hope I won't be locked out of using vision pro just because its input modality isn't compatible with my body...

boppo1• 3 years ago

You might be SOL on version 1 or 2 but they'll figure it out eventually.

bentcorner• 3 years ago

One could hope they have an accessibility mode where the eye targets are larger. Or they offer a hardware controller pointer.

david_van_loon2• 3 years ago

Index finger, wrist, and head are supported as alternate pointers.

fotta• 3 years ago

They describe alternate pointer modes in this presentation (18:30) https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/10034

samplatt3• 3 years ago

Curious. How do you go with 'normal' VR? Are there any problems playing games?

NolF• 3 years ago

Considering there is a "calibration" step. I'm going to guess that as long as the "bad" eye behaves relatively predictably, it should be able to ignore the bad input and put appropriate weight on the "good" eye.

It will also be interesting how the outward display will display the "bad" eye input including missing eyes, lazy eyes, nystagmus, etc...

m3kw9• 3 years ago

They have accessibility/alternative input features to help with that

ChristopherDrum• 3 years ago

From Apple's visionOS page, re: Accessibility (https://developer.apple.com/visionos/)

"And for people who prefer a different way to navigate content, Pointer Control lets them select their index finger, wrist, or head as an alternative pointer."

This reads to me like they've got you covered (at least in principle).

judge20202• 3 years ago

From a Q&A session, a trackpad will also work.

ehnto4• 3 years ago

Hopefully you can just set one eye as dominant. I as well have one good eye, so just using that one for tracking should be fine.

bowsamic3• 3 years ago

Covered in a basic sense, but that's an extremely diminished experience which basically removes half the reason to use it

jayd163• 3 years ago

Eye tracking most certainly sounds like the way to go, relative to hand-waving.

I suppose Apple could change my mind but I've never been a fan of eyes as input. Touch typing or any equivalent where you can look at one thing and do another seems impossible now.

acchow• 3 years ago

I'd wait for the product to actually launch before making such a judgement

charlie0• 3 years ago

The arm waving is some form of exercise, which is a plus for me.

discordance• 3 years ago

"Gorilla arm" is a term engineers coined about 30 years ago to describe what happens when people try to use these interfaces for an extended period of time. It's the touchscreen equivalent of carpal-tunnel syndrome. According to the New Hacker's Dictionary, "the arm begins to feel sore, cramped and oversized -- the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touchscreen and feels like one afterwards."

https://www.wired.com/2010/10/gorilla-arm-multitouch/

Fr0styMatt88• 3 years ago

I’m with you on this one, but I also have nystagmus in both eyes. I’ve been curious but also somewhat apprehensive about stuff starting to rely on eye tracking and whether these edge cases will get handled.

Probably best for me not to be an early-adopter in this case :)

Edit to add: Can confirm that Apple stuff is amazing with accessibility, so I’m not surprised there are alternative input methods. My main thinking towards the future is around how nystagmus and foveated rendering will interact. That’s a giant and fascinating research topic I imagine.

robomartin• 3 years ago

Strabismus and amblyopia are common enough (4% of the population) that one would hope these types of systems would make sensible provisions to accommodate people with these conditions.

https://www.childrenshospital.org/conditions/strabismus-and-...

csomar• 3 years ago

Lazy eyes, I think, are probably popular among software developers (I got one, and most devs I know have eyes issues). I think that's why Apple got lenses too. I think (hope) they got us covered since we'll be the first to use, develop on, and afford these devices.

teddyh• 3 years ago

The Minority Report movie probably set the industry back by a decade or two. Waving your hands around to control stuff seems logical but is quickly exhausting.

The bad idea had waves even before that: Remember the gorilla arm.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html

pmontra4• 3 years ago

I remember the gorilla arm but I found out that occasionally raising a hand from the keyboard and tapping the screen is not a noticeable effort and it's faster than aiming at the touchpad or (of course) reaching for the mouse. I discovered it mostly by using a Samsung tablet with both a Dex interface over Android and with an Ubuntu Unity one (the defunct Dex for Linux.)

That's maybe because the screen is small and low. Raising an arm at or above the head is a different matter. If you're cycling with a heart rate monitor you discover that you add some beats when you raise your hands (say, go from 150 to 155) and gain some if you lower your chest close to the handlebar. This doesn't take into account increased or reduced drag because I measured it at home on trainers.

malloci• 3 years ago

The Minority Report movie probably set the industry back by a decade or two. Waving your hands around to control stuff seems logical but is quickly exhausting.

There was an operations center I worked at that had a large touch screen (think cnn wall), that always sat in the corner of the area collecting dust, but whenever some higher up would visit it would get pulled out and used just to provide a wow factor. It was always the unlucky one that ended up having to use it during this time. The fatigue was horrible.

hazebooth• 3 years ago

I tried the HoloLens ages ago and honestly the only upgrade would be the display & how often the inputs worked. Microsoft was demoing the HoloLens @ some hackathon and had a program where you could flip pages in a virtual book. On top of the book looking super low quality / illegible, I could never get the controls to work. The only thing that will make the vision pro seem like a worthwhile purchase would be if the controls worked flawlessly. I already have faith in the displays & picture.

Chyzwar• 3 years ago

I have a divergent squint on both eyes when tired/exhausted. I yet to try VR with eye tracking. Furthermore, I think the future would be some kind of brain reading implant/scanner.

stavros3• 3 years ago

Does anyone know how these notes are generated? Is it a custom site, or something off the shelf?

Karunamon2• 3 years ago

He says it's a custom site: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes

That said, you can have something identical to this with Obsidian with a few plug-ins and their hosting service.

https://obsidian.md/

https://github.com/deathau/sliding-panes-obsidian

stavros3• 3 years ago

Thanks, that looks very useful! I wrote a script to export Markdown from Joplin notes (https://gitlab.com/stavros/notes/), but the UI in this site is better.

andymatuschak4• 3 years ago

It’s custom.

stavros3• 3 years ago

Ah, thank you, they look great.

ttepasse• 3 years ago

If you got time and energy in the near future, please, consider slightly enhancing it according to the average web surfers expectations. Particular irritants were the broken scrolling (bound to a container), the broken footnote links and the forbidden content behind links. Additionally the classic escape hatch, Safari Reader, didn’t work.

dvt3• 3 years ago

This is a bit of a rant, but I bought a Quest Pro last year, and I feel it was a total waste of money. It's actually embarrassing how much of an unpolished piece of garbage it feels like. Sure, it's fun as a PCVR headset, but as a productivity tool or as a multimedia consuming device, or as a social tool, it completely misses the mark.

And I'd say that 80% of its failure can be attributed to bad software. It's buggy, I constantly have to re-calibrate my work/play area, the hand tracking is janky, and even though it supports (incredible) eye tracking, almost nothing takes actual advantage of the hardware.

It's insane that a billion-dollar company like Meta actually felt proud to release such a steaming pile of trash. Do they seriously expect VR enthusiasts to build an entire operating system for them? Much like the reports we're getting about the Vision Pro, the eye tracking in the Quest Pro feels like magic, but nothing uses it—basically it's irrelevant to navigating the operating system and barely any games use foveated rendering. It's infuriating.

If I was Zuck, I'd fire all my product managers. I say good for Apple. I'll probably be selling my Quest Pro and buying the Vision Pro.

balaji14• 3 years ago

Fitness and gaming wasn't demoed much yesterday, but are going to be insane on the Vision Pro - so I guess it was just too obvious to demo. Or is it?

Also Meta could catch up if it was just software. But how big of a deal is the M2+R1?

Anyway the metaverse was already being retracted, else this Vision Pro could have hammered Meta.

Clearly Occulus has to evolve to match VisionPro. Controller has to be optional. It has to have better AR. Meta has to be the more "open" alternative to Apple's ecosystem barriers.

dvt3• 3 years ago

Also Meta could catch up if it was just software.

This was Microsoft's warcry for years: who cares if Apple has better software? We have better hardware. Well guess what, software matters and it matters more than hardware. If you have both, you have literally a generationally-defining product (e.g. the iPhone), but even if you just have the software, you'll still eat your competitor's lunch. Why does everyone have MacBook Pros these days? Prior to Apple Silicon, it certainly wasn't the hardware.

Meta's about to get a rude awakening because "we can fix the software later." As if technical debt doesn't exist and as if you can so easily get engineers that eagerly want to clean up someone else's mess.

mikenew4• 3 years ago

I guess it was just too obvious to demo. Or is it?

Gaming can't be good, because there's no controllers. Even if the hand and eye tracking is absolutely S-tier, you're never getting something like button input from swinging your empty hands around, twitching your fingers. Just the occlusion from the back of your hand would be enough enough for that to be impossible.

Fitness might be more doable, but even then I think you're going to be very limited with hand tracking only. I think there's a reason why Apple skipped over those segments almost entirely.

EDIT: I meant "VR" controllers, as in things that are tracked in 3d space. Of course you can use a game pad or MKB, but that kinda misses the point of being in VR in the first place.

throwaway4aday3• 3 years ago

I for one will be sticking to controllers and forgoing eye tracking. Hand input is irritating and limited, I hate using pinch gestures to click on things and the article makes a solid point that the lack of haptic feedback just makes it feel like you're flailing around (which you are). Eye tracking is nice to have in social interactions but I don't see the point otherwise.

morisy• 3 years ago

so I guess it was just too obvious to demo. Or is it?

I certainly don't think so? My guess going in was that fitness would be one of the main plugs — especially because high-end fitness devices already cost a fair amount, and that would have made their tail end, "How much would a computer plus a screen plus umm... it's $3,5000!" go a lot more smoothly.

I do think that's likely high on the road map, particularly given such a large investment in Fitness+, but also can see them being very wary about encouraging any high-energy movements with a $3,500 device. I think it's the pricing and dev-kit-ish nature of the v1 more than too obvious.

But Vision Pro does seem to imply a future Vision Sport.

prawn3• 3 years ago

Could be that they're leaving it (and gaming/etc) for developers. They largely showed core stuff only at this point.

The platform launch was very locked down. For incremental hardware upgrades, they put hardware in the hands of devs by either shipping out early or bringing devs to their offices to work on prototypes in a secure environment.

grogenaut6• 3 years ago

Sweating profusely in an electronics device... I've ruined ski goggles just sweating in them and they're meant for that. Also just stumbling with these on or slipping and there you go cracked $3500 screen.

cubefox15• 3 years ago

The Quest Pro has actual VR games and proper VR controllers though. I doubt that such games are possible or probable with eye pointing and finger clicking alone. Apple also didn't include any VR games into their presentation.

kalleboo3• 3 years ago

VR gaming is a flop. Lots of people bought headsets, played with them for a day and now they're all gathering dust. Apple is right to ignore it.

MBCook9• 3 years ago

I’m sure people can come up with games or interfaces that would work just fine.

But they also showed full support for pairing standard Xbox and PlayStation controllers and playing with those the way you can on any other Apple platform (except the watch, of course).

dilap2• 3 years ago

tracks with what carmack said when he left. what a shame!

sangnoir• 3 years ago

It's insane that a billion-dollar company like Meta actually felt proud to release such a steaming pile of trash.

Can you name a better product in the price-bracket?

dvt3• 3 years ago

If you have a product that's 5x as good, but 2x as expensive, literally everyone will buy it. The iPhone is the perfect case study.

cascades42• 3 years ago

I'm with you. Had the same exact problems, and I returned mine.

Interestingly, the Quest 2 seemed less buggy when I had one.

wahahah• 3 years ago

I found it notable Apple has this to say about eye tracking under the "Learn more about privacy and security" section:

Eye input is not shared with Apple, third-party apps, or websites. Only your final selections are transmitted when you tap your fingers together.

Along with this small video: https://www.apple.com/105/media/us/apple-vision-pro/2023/7e2...

Which is great and important for me to see, but I'm unsure how that jives with features such as foveated rendering.

reaperman2• 3 years ago

You can get a surprising amount of information about cognitive processes from eye tracking. I worked on the industrial version of HP Reverb G2 which included a PPG sensor and Tobii eye tracking. Was really an amazing product which suffered from having to use third party platforms like Windows Mixed Reality and OpenXR which didn’t have first class support for what was possible.

One notable takeaway is that eye tracking of saccades is loosely correlated with cognitive load. In fact, “cognitive load” was a product that would be licensed to developers to use in their apps so that difficulty levels could be dynamically adjusted to keep users in a sweet spot for learning.

Especially when combined with a PPG sensor which can in theory detect if a man gets aroused (HP never investigated developing a model for that, but some comments from friends who were DoD-aligned contractors expressed alternating concern or interest in it, because they knew from their own career and independent research what applications might be possible with those technologies)

…it could be used to infer things which someone might prefer to keep private (I.e. which categories of things they have an emotional response to).

Apple definitely is aware of this and is heading off potential issues by not only not providing that data to third party app developers but also even to Apple itself. Apple does have a strong pre-existing framework for dealing with sensitive health data, so they could have decided to capture similar data and treat it the same way they deal with ECG data. HP did not have a HIPAA compatible framework so they threw away 99% of the PPG data and distilled it down to just “heart rate” which was the only data source available to app developers from the PPG sensor.

gnicholas12• 3 years ago

I imagine there will be some developers that try to have analytics fire when certain events happen, correlated with eye-hovering. Hopefully Apple will catch these tricks before they can go live. The potential value of knowing where someone's eyes are (whether they saw an advertisement, for example) could be very high, so I envision a cat-and-mouse game.

TuringNYC• 3 years ago

I got one last year also, but was disappointed by software selection. My children loved the hardware but wanted more software. At their behest, I tried to write my own software for it, but went in circles trying to figure out what SDK to use.

I wish someone on the SDK team there could observe me as I tried to search for this information and failed because it would be super-informative on how to (and how not to) succeed on creating a wider community of apps...by making SDKs easily available.

bluSCALE4• 3 years ago

This is on brand for meta. Look at fb. It didn't come with instructions, but that didn't stop Cambridge Analytica from happening. Look at React. It didn't have instructions and yet it blew up. I bet Meta expected people to pick up the slack, that the best of what was there while they killed time polishing it.

Zuck was probably part of the problem... a room full of POs pushing for stupid shit while building on a rocky foundation.

pfannkuchen• 3 years ago

It’s kind of funny that meta stock didn’t drop on the vision pro announcement. What does that say about the market’s assessment of meta’s vr/ar prospects?

ulfw• 3 years ago

The market is hedging it's bets.

If Vision Pro will succeed Meta could be seen as the cheap-ass alternative. 3500USD vs 500USD is like Ferrari vs. Kia. Not everyone can afford the former.

If Vision Pro doesn't succeed, the market will likely move on from VR completely, leaving Apple and Meta in the same place. Money spent, product introduced, tried, didn't work. Move on.

pharmakom3• 3 years ago

maybe the odds of meta dropping the whole vr thing have increased? then they can stop lighting piles of money on fire because zuck read snow crash as a teenager? OTOH, maybe apple will show meta how a headset can actually be done and they can mimic their way to product market fit?

albert_e• 3 years ago

I actually expected the opposite TBH.

Not because Meta had a better product, but Apple putting its might into this product category means that "Meta" is vindicated in investing here -- that there exists / will exist a viable market for this technology in coming years.

All the damage done by the poor quality 3D renders of AR/VR worlds from Metaverse -- that made a layperson laugh at the concept of AR/VR -- is probably partly offset by the positive press and marketing budgets that Apple will bring to the table.

01100011• 3 years ago

It's insane that a billion-dollar company like Meta actually felt proud to release such a steaming pile of trash

Let's be real. You can have all the money in the world, but that doesn't guarantee you access to talent. It doesn't guarantee that you made insightful technical decisions that hamstring you later in the product cycle. It doesn't free you from short-sighted managers or employees who just care about making it to the next vesting cycle.

When you're a billion-dollar(haha, not so significant these days) company, you have a tremendous pressure to show results. You have tremendous pressure to show innovation and be first to market. It has no bearing on the quality of the products you release in the short-to-medium term.

zaptrem5• 3 years ago

John Carmack led them to a very strong technical base. Based on his testimony they squandered it.

pavlov• 3 years ago

It’s a long game. In both desktop and mobile, a viable and commercially successful alternative emerged even though Apple had the edge in sophistication and innovation.

A lot of people probably don’t remember what Android looked like in 2007. Using the Android pre-release SDK next to an iPhone, you’d come to a similar conclusion as yours: how does Google release a mobile OS so behind the curve? Should they fire all their product managers?

Same story with Windows in 1986. It was difficult to see how the graceless file manager from Microsoft could compete with Apple’s holistic GUI.

Give it four years. I think Meta intends to be the Windows and Android of this third wave of UIs. Validation of the market by Apple is exactly what they’ve been waiting for.

penjelly• 3 years ago

i dont understand this mentality, obviously the intent is to improve the experience over time, creating a VR platform itself is an ambitious task. Are there no happy customers of the Quest?

metas strategy is to release a cheaper consumer product and improve it iteratively. Hate to break it to you but day1 apple vision pro will have software bugs too.

BoppreH3• 3 years ago

I echo the awe at the hardware and the disappointment at the paradigm. I wish the keynote had three extra demos:

- Something whimsical to inspire developers. Give me files represented as physical blocks that I can pile, or a task manager that shows processes as plants around me. Close apps by scrunching their screen like paper. A globe with my geotagged pictures.

- A game, any game. Beat Saber was the killer app for me to get my Vive, and Valve already spent tens of millions of dollars to create a triple-A VR game. Neither seem compatible with the Vision Pro input methods. Apple could at least play their strengths, like an AR hide-and-seek, or a horror game with eye tracking.

- Content creation or professional work. The last thing we need is another passive device to watch 3D TikTok. Show someone customizing their "home screen" environment to look like a fantasy potion shop; or a mechanic looking at a 20x magnified broken part; or an SRE watching their kubernetes cluster as a floating 3D graph; or a VFX artist in the scene scrubbing forward and backward to adjust an effect.

It feels like inventing the first smartphone, camera apps and all, but it doesn't make calls and the only input is tapping on icons.

TX81Z9• 3 years ago

Nobody may need TikTok on their face, but that doesn’t mean many wouldn’t want it.

TikTok on your face likely has better market potential than the dreadful Horizon Worlds.

krackers• 3 years ago

or a task manager that shows processes as plants around me.

We finally have the technology to bring https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html to life

mk_stjames• 3 years ago

  > Give me files represented as physical blocks that I can pile

Man, people still want a file manager like fsn on IRIX systems, 30 years later...

BoppreH3• 3 years ago

I used Eagle Mode[1][2] for a number of years, and it was non-ironically the best file manager I've ever used. I only stopped because it required dozens of very out-of-date packages for its preview features.

But the point of whimsical demos is inspiration, like a concept car, not complete realism.

[1] https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6yPQKt3mBA

Xenoamorphous• 3 years ago

This is UNIX! I know this!

kkarakk3• 3 years ago

VisionOS uses old school UI like blocks and doesn't do anything new in terms of just reusing design paradigms from ipadOS/macOS. It makes sense why people would think of it just as a computer they strap to their face.

Half of their marketing was about how it's a essentially a macbook that you strap to your face...

BirAdam• 3 years ago

It takes time for developers to get the device and begin writing software for it. As time marches on, those things that we all find value in get bought by Apple or Google and become the default apps for things. If someone then decides to try something crazy, cool. If not, someone else later will make a competing device that tries. If it wins, cool. If it doesn’t, someone will make it way later still (like Apple recreated what General Magic was working on way later).

lolinder7• 3 years ago

A game, any game.

By far the most disappointing part of the keynote was when they finally do show someone playing a game, and it's a basketball game played with a regular controller on a flat, virtual TV. The TV is even smaller than an average real-world TV.

It's typical of Apple to so completely ignore gaming, but it's disappointing that they're continuing that trend even with VR.

Gigachad2• 3 years ago

Realistically, that's probably the best we are getting for a while. VR gaming has had a difficult time. The physical space requirements are immense and the gameplay types have been limited.

A lot of value could be had playing flat screen games this way. Imagine sitting on a plane with a controller in your lap, but it feels like you are sitting in a private loungeroom or some zen environment playing a game on a large TV.

hackernewds2• 3 years ago

Because gamers, or even consumers, is not the target demographic for a $3500 device. They want to brand as a device for enthusiasts (but Apple everything!) or professional (work video chat, artists, graphic designers).

sebzim45005• 3 years ago

- Something whimsical to inspire developers. Give me files represented as physical blocks that I can pile, or a task manager that shows processes as plants around me. Close apps by scrunching their screen like paper. A globe with my geotagged pictures.

I respect Apple for not doing this. These are demos that are kind of fun for 20 minutes but you would never want to actually use a device like this: https://youtu.be/z4FGzE4endQ?t=59

david_van_loon2• 3 years ago

His comments on anchoring virtual tools in physical space reminds me of the work Microsoft was doing with Hololens and Windows Mixed Reality. If I recall correctly, there were APIs for anchoring things in space.

cobertos2• 3 years ago

I recall stumbling upon those too in the Win 10 mixed reality API docs. There were a lot of interesting things in there that never really saw the light of day/any significant use

EDIT: Found the API docs. There's some really interesting classes in there! I remember handling coordinates to be confusing/a pain though haha. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.perception...

TheRealPomax6• 3 years ago

How about we wait until someone actually has one to review?

suzzer99• 3 years ago

This is pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFvXuyITwBI

TheRealPomax6• 3 years ago

While I do enjoy me some MKBHD, I'd like the opinion of someone who's not fully bought into the Apple ecosystem already. This is a good perspective to have, but it's an incomplete perspective.

And I'd like to know how realistic this thing is for "not apple users". It's a VR headset, can I use it with Windows to play MS Flight Simulator or Star Citizen? Can I use it on Linux to get wall-to-wall emavs? More real world testing is required.

prawn3• 3 years ago

This reminds me of people who gripe about sports rumours in forums about rumoured player signings. If you're not interested in speculation about hardware not yet freely in the hands of users, why not leave it to people who find that discussion interesting?

There are reports now from dozens of people who've had similar 30 minute sessions using some of the features. That's enough to get an idea of some facets, guess at what's not polished, what's not ready at all. But they're all easy to ignore if you want to wait until next year.

armchairhacker• 3 years ago

I think the big usecase of the Vision Pro is just a larger screen and immersion. That's what it looks like Apple highlights in the demos.

Imagine developing with the ultimate 10x setup: several files, documentation, and debuggers open at once, with a zen nature background. Or making music, or painting, or even writing a research paper.

Imagine playing a video game but the environment wraps around you. Imagine watching movies in a virtual theater with a simulated 100-inch TV (one of Apple's demos). Even reading and browsing the web can be improved with an ambient environment and extra space for more stuff.

Is it worth $3500? For end-users probably not, but if it genuinely makes professionals and hobbyists substantially more productive, it will be worth $3500 or even way more. How much money would you spend to write, code, create faster?

Of course, this assumes the VR actually performs, and whether a bigger screen and immersion actually makes people work faster. As of now it seems VR is still a gimmick which impresses people at first, but doesn't provide much outside of niche experiences; which, if this holds for the Vision Pro, makes it very much not worth the price.

ttcbj• 3 years ago

If you want that immersion, I think $3500 is totally reasonable. I paid more than that for my two additional monitors.

The problem for me is that I like monitors better. I like the feeling of real space around me. I cannot conceive of wearing googles on my head all day. I just don’t want to.

And I definitely don’t want to be separated from other humans by googles. It just not attractive to me.

throwaway4aday3• 3 years ago

Imagine developing with the ultimate 10x setup: several files, documentation, and debuggers open at once, with a zen nature background. Or making music, or painting, or even writing a research paper.

I used to believe this was the ideal setup, hell I even implemented it with monitors, but since I've integrated LLMs into my development process I find all I need are two side by side windows and now with CopilotX those are both in VSCode. I occasionally venture out for documentation but even that will make its way into the editor at some point. Using Edge and the Bing sidebar I can even save myself the trouble of reading through all of the documentation on a page by just asking Bing to retrieve the info I want from the page I'm on.

Doing all that in VR would be cool but I don't think it's going to increase my productivity nearly as much as LLMs have.

Disclaimer: I'm bullish on VR and I love gaming and socializing in VR

dmitrygr• 3 years ago

but since I've integrated LLMs into my development process I find all I need are two side by side windows

This irrelevant for those of us not doing cookie-cutter-been-done-1000000-times-before stuff. In such cases all the LLMs in the world are useless, but many pages of docs open at once are useful. Go tell your LLM to write a ARMv6M assembly MIPS-II emulator. I'll wait. Go on.

jojobas• 3 years ago

The pixel density appears to be about half of a no-frills monitor at a usual distance. There's plenty for movies and games but just not enough to emulate your 2-4 working windows at a reasonable angular size.

MBCook9• 3 years ago

I think the big usecase of the Vision Pro is just a larger screen and immersion

No one has come up with anything better yet. That’s one of the big problems with VR that I’ve seen. Do you have games on one hand, and a virtual environment showing mostly 2D stuff on the other.

I think that’s one of the reasons Apple is releasing this when they are. I sort of suspect they’ve gone about as far as they can. They don’t have a killer app, but that’s ok.

They’re putting it out there for developers, and we’ll see. Someone will come up with something compelling.

VisiCalc, Lotus 123, WordPerfect, Photoshop, PageMaker, Angry Birds, the web… none of them came from the platform vendor. So what will someone come up with that will make everyone rush to order the Vision 2 when it’s announced for $1500?

layer84• 3 years ago

Regarding the last part, I was wondering if an AR UI would maybe start a trend back to a more 3D/skeuomorphic design (in the sense of NextStep/Windows 95), which then would also have a comeback on the desktop. That's mostly just wishful thinking on my part, though. ;)

sebkomianos• 3 years ago

Slightly offtopic: What a cool personal website!

lukevp• 3 years ago

From years of observing first-hand how hard it is to develop software, I’m shocked that Apple continually makes products that fit their aesthetic (eg. The crown and headband evoking the Apple Watch) and have coherent and mostly-baked software on launch like this. Is there a book about how they’re able to operate at scale and deliver such consistent things? Do they just have an insanely good product team? How do they document requirements? It’s fascinating to me, because I think it’s their real competitive advantage - they get to the finish line with product that would make sense to a single, invested, super smart person, instead of a pile of inconsistencies and incoherencies that contradict each other as you move through the application. The only other product I feel is delivered at Apple’s level is CloudFlare, and I think that’s why they’ve grown so fast.

anonred• 3 years ago

Hypothesis: Apple is a hardware company that also does software, and that ethos allows them to ship more complex products over much longer time scales than their competitors.

msoad• 3 years ago

I agree. Sometimes it feels Apple ships software too slowly. For example we have to wait for iOS 17 to be released to get a Whisper level dictation on the iPhone while Whisper has been out for almost a year. But maybe shipping at the pace of hardware is a good thing. Maybe we shouldn't deploy our sites on each commit

makeitdouble5• 3 years ago

You could say the same about Dyson or Oxo or Bodum. Having a single esthetic and coherent product line is a choice.

On the face of it, it sounds like a company would want coherency, but in practice it means leaving a lot of money on the table for every single of your products. Any consistent design decisions means anyone who's not pleased by it has no option in your lineup to go to. That's of course a gamble Apple is willing to take.

For instance, Apple consistently uses glass and metal in their product design, the only exception I can think of being airpods and their mouse. I personally prefered the plastic for weight and comfort, so that set me out of the market for their headphones and I went to Sony for instance.

Same for laptops with touchscreens, if you care any bit about them Apple is a no go to you. Same for so many things.

PS: on inconsitencies and incoherencies, Windows is the king of the kitchen sink approach, and it's consistently stayed ahead of Apple in numbers. Another instance on how being opiniated isn't only a positive aspect from a business perspective.

inconceivable• 3 years ago

porsche also.

hnaccount_rng• 3 years ago

Your point is valid, but that ... diversity? ... comes at a _very_ steep price. Not only for the manufacturer, also for the consumer! With Apple I _know_ a couple of things about any future purchase, without ever having used, held or felt the particular product. Namely: 1) Build quality will be significantly higher than competitors, 2) It will hurt my feelings to look at the bill after checkout, 3) It will work as advertised (or slightly better).

Yes there also will be quirks I'll be unhappy with, which I _could_ (given enough time and experimentations) find a better solution for. But fundamentally I'll be getting a solid product, that works well enough. It is _that_ promise, which fundamentally allows Apple to do an online store and do a mostly directly-to-customer retail operation.

If you increase diversity, you make this "buy any product and you'll be fine" thing so much more complicated, loosing more sales than the niches even contain. I'd guess almost all people just want it to work :TM:, at least that's me, and that's me deciding the phone of my mum

mdorazio• 3 years ago

I know it's a joke, but I think it's still a good illustration: https://i.imgur.com/XLuaF0h.png

From everything I've heard, Apple's org structure is a lot more focused and UX-driven from the top down than basically any other large tech company. That means you get a lot less compromising and in-fighting.

The other side is how Apple makes money compared to other companies. Meta makes money mostly by selling you (the user) to advertisers (the real customers). Same with Google (70%ish ad revenue). Microsoft is a hot mess of competing B2B fiefdoms (the vast majority of their revenue comes from businesses, not consumers). Amazon only makes a few products directly for consumers, and mostly makes money from being a marketplace + AWS. That leaves Apple fairly uniquely positioned as a premium consumer hardware company that also sells consumer software services to enhance the experience and... drive more hardware sales.

hackernewds2• 3 years ago

If you just draw the org structure for Apple differently in the link, it's same as Amazon..

notnotjake2• 3 years ago

Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda is the closest, modern look inside Apple's product development that I've found. Focus is on the development of the software for the original iPhone and is a great book.

zerealshadowban• 3 years ago

Yes! this book is a first-person account of product development at Apple, showing how both the design and the features of a system tool keep progressing under the selective pressure of iterative review sessions, with creative and specific challenges provided by managers at multiple levels, all the way to the top (Steve Jobs at the time of the book's tales). It's a great book, very well written, the only one I've read that provides insight into (some of) Apple's creative process. When they say that Steve's DNA has profoundly shaped the company, I imagine this is one aspect of what they mean.

andrethegiant• 3 years ago

I wonder how much can be attributed to Radar, their homegrown bug tracking / project management service.

reedciccio• 3 years ago

Fascinating... Where can I read more about this Radar tool?

dwayne_dibley2• 3 years ago

not only that but how they manage to keep it all relatively hush hush until the big reveal.

_xnmw• 3 years ago

It's Steve Jobs' legacy and a function of the authoritarian, highly controlled process he created. A democratic self-directed environment like Google or design-by-committee like Microsoft could never produce such a product line. Even an Intel with billions more in funding cannot recreate TSMC factories.

alkonaut• 3 years ago

If I were to speculate I'd say it's because they don't ship things until they are finished. I'm sure a lot of the polished launches we have seen have been late by 6, 12 or 24 months. If the market isn't ready, the product doesn't ship. If the technology isn't ready (say, a high enough resolution VR display) to create a wow product then the product doesn't ship. I think it takes a great organization to not "accidentally" ship bad things. You need to prevent bonuses, egos, sunk costs, and self-deception from shipping something bad prematurely.

cmrdporcupine• 3 years ago

They're absolutely awful at online / web-based services though. Embarrassingly bad at that kind of software.

andymatuschak4• 3 years ago

You might enjoy Ken Kocienda's "Creative Selection", which gives his first-person account of Apple's creative process.

smugma• 3 years ago

Reading through his notes, I couldn’t help but think “I don’t know this guy, but it seems like he has spent years thinking deeply about interfaces. Also, he sounds ex-Apple.” It made me smile when I got towards the end and my suspicions were confirmed.

Andy’s thoughts were infinitely deeper than anything else I’ve read about the device+interface so far. In particular, I liked his observations that so far it’s mostly a 2D plane, with exceptions like the Breathe app and a few demos, which might just be good for demos.

Seeing the heart in 3D reminded a lot of what we saw 10 years ago around what book publishers were trying to do with the iPad. Cool demos but limited real world use.

Here was one particularly thoughtful section:

“unlike the physical version, a virtual infospace could contend with much more material than could actually fit in my field of view, because the computational medium affords dynamic filtering, searching, and navigation interactions (see Softspace for one attempt). And you could swap between persistent room-scale infospaces for different projects. I suspect that visionOS’s windowing system is not at all up to this task.“

andymatuschak4• 3 years ago

That's very kind; thank you.

thewebcount• 3 years ago

Reading through it, I was struck by the contrast of how broken the web page was with what the author was saying about UX. The author seems experienced in the field, but the site felt completely broken. I don’t know if it’s a device or browser issue, but reading on my iPad, if I tried to use my right thumb to scroll, the page acted as if I had reached the end of the article, even though it was clear there was more because the last visible line was only half-visible. (And this was after having to manually zoom in because all the text was shoved to one side and tiny.) Scrolling with my left thumb worked about 50% of the time. The rest of the time it worked as poorly as scrolling with my right thumb. I gave up after about 5 paragraphs.

nsfmc• 3 years ago

that site is not really suitable for mass consumption, iirc it used to even have a caveat that said it really only existed to make certain leaf nodes sharable. it's basically a personal zettelkasten, but this update was also sent to his patreons as well, where the writing just ended up being whatever your email client made of it.

Version467• 3 years ago

If you visit his top level website, you can see that it uses a columnar layout. I agree that it compromises the experience if a single article is linked like this, especially on smaller screens, but it isn't broken, this is how it is intended. It just doesn't cater to all formfactors.

vxNsr• 3 years ago

Did we see the same website? The page I visited appeared to just be straight text. I’m on a iPhone with safari. It felt like a totally normal blog post by someone who doesn’t care for the current js heavy web.

tdehnke• 3 years ago

Reader mode solved that.

skydhash• 3 years ago

What if programs live in places, live in physical objects in your space? For instance, you might place all kinds of computational objects in your kitchen: timers above your stove; knife work reference overlays above your cutting board; a representation of your fridge’s contents; a catalog of recipes organized by season; etc.

I'd prefer an OS that spans multiple devices. Something how computers behave in “The Expanse” where someone can flick stuff from their mobile device to another system for a better workspace. If I'm typing this on my workstation, but want to switch environment and bring something light like a tablet or just my phone, I could send the tab and it would retain its state. The closest to something like this is a server-client architecture like Logitech Media Server. A paradigm like this would be more useful than immersion.

This is also why I like Vim. Buffer is a separate concept from File, adding an extra flexibility – in terms of layout – to how I edit to complete my current task. I want a similar flexibility with applications, at least lightweight – state wise – ones.

CloudKit and Handoff are close, but very brittle. Apps like Bear, Reeder, Anybox, Things 3, make switching devices seamless. Another good example is handoff between the HomePod and the iPhone.

feifan• 3 years ago

Apps like Bear, Reeder, Anybox, Things 3, make switching devices seamless

I think Apple's whole point is that they provide the APIs so that apps can do this themselves. Which, yeah, is a bit disappointing; I'd love to have a 100% fidelity, flick-to-another-device type of Continuity built into the OS, but the APIs are at least a starting point.

throwuwu6• 3 years ago

Simple protocols would enable this for existing hardware and software

ElFitz3• 3 years ago

Reminds me of some descriptions of Bell’s Plan 9.

AlexanderTheGr8• 3 years ago

Sorry for hijacking this thread for a question about personal curiosity but does anyone know of an affordable way of measuring pupil distance?

I want to measure my pupil distance while browsing social media. The reasoning is my reading in "Thinking Fast and Slow" that pupils dilate when we see something we find interesting / something we like / when we are thinking and vice-versa. I want to put it to the test and it seems like finally the consumer tech is close to making it possible.

Does quest support pupil tracking? I did some cursory research but couldn't find any reference for it. Industry pupil tracking headsets are way too expensive; My last hope is that someone will jailbreak vision pro...

CamperBob2• 3 years ago

Hold up a ruler to your face and look in the mirror. Or take a photo so you can measure distances in an image-editing app.

throwuwu6• 3 years ago

A high res webcam and OpenCV?

robwwilliams• 3 years ago

Vision Pro opens opportunities for a new web interface of the type that Gary Flake and team were building with Silverlight and Pivot at Live Labs.

Gary has a great TED talk (Mar 2010) on this radical but intuitive spatial sorting interface. Foveation and hand movements are perfect user links.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT_x9s67yWA

Combined with a Vision Pro—OMG.

andsoitis• 3 years ago

Punch Cards --> Text Terminals --> GUIs/WIMP --> ?

? =! Vision Pro

notnotjake2• 3 years ago

I was hoping to see more paradigm shifting user interface ideas. I think those exist inside Apple Park, but are waiting for their time. It's telling that this was announced at the developers conference. The focus now is on the platform, and I think mind-blowing user experiences will come later. (At least I hope)

brandall102• 3 years ago

Anyone surprised they didn't incorporate an EEG sensor and use that in conjunction with eye tracking? They could acquire someone like Neurosky.

I thought at this stage, it would be fairly foolproof to use that at the very least to simulate something like a click, no?

tsunamifury• 3 years ago

They want to ease us into the dystopian nightmare…

cobertos2• 3 years ago

I find it interesting that Microsoft had _so much of this_ 9 years go. I developed with the HoloLens 1 around 2016 and I recall:

* Fingers together gesture clicking.

* Voice activated menu navigation. It was glitchy/I never used it though. In 2023 these sorts of systems are much better though.

* No controllers. It was all gesture based. Opening the start menu required your hand upturned, fingers together then outstretch. Kind of like an "open" gesture.

* "Pointing" based on head looking vector, which was annoying.

* Spatial anchors and being able to remember past spaces and how you used them. There was a whole set of SDK APIs for the spatial stuff built into Win 10

The Vision Pro iterates on some of these. Eye tracking for pointing and more cameras for tracking hand pose for clicking, to reduce the annoyance/strain. IMO all mandatory for long term usage (I frequently got motion sick with the HoloLens and the 3 months of debugging/developing on it were a challenge).

Maybe if Microsoft had switched to more commonplace display technology and continued to iterate on their product instead of let it languish, they could have had a solid competitor to this, if not maybe be first to the market.

askvictor2• 3 years ago

This is classic Apple. They're never the first mover; they let others fail, learn from those mistakes, and make a pretty polished product that everyone thinks they created the genre.

rchaud3• 3 years ago

Classic is right. That period ended with the iPad reveal almost 15 years ago.

jillesvangurp3• 3 years ago

Microsoft and other companies ultimately chickened out of taking risk with this. It happens a lot. I worked for Nokia around the time that the rumors about the iphone started swirling in 2006. Exact same thing. At that time, Nokia had multiple touch screen operating systems, a linux based internet tablet running a mozilla based browser with a webcam, Symbian phones running browsers based on khtml (which later evolved into webkit, safari and chrome), lots of nice hardware, lots of investment in hardware, chips, radio technology, etc. A lot of mobile firsts happened long before there were iphones, android phones, ipads, etc. Nokia had a huge technical moat.

Six years later Nokia pulled the plug on the whole thing because it got absolutely steam rolled by Apple who had none of those things but started building them around the same time Nokia decided to focus o flip phones instead (sorry, this level of corporate insanity still makes me angry). They were worried about the Motorola Razr more than they were about the iphone. They actually killed multiple touch screen platforms because of that before scrambling to re-build one around the sinking ship that was Symbian. And then they badly botched that. Reason: Nokia management was arrogant, out of touch, clueless, incompetent, complacent and utterly in denial about there even being a problem. Six years later the whole lot got fired and sold off to ... Microsoft. Who of course promptly killed it because Apple had won already and between them and Google, MS saw no path to success. So, they walked away from the whole thing.

That's the company we're talking about here. So, sure, MS has stuff that they've been sitting on for ages. But what they've lacked for years is any clue as to what to do with all that stuff. Like with the iphone, Apple has been known to prepare something for years. And people just assumed it would be fine and disappointing.

IMHO things are not that hopeless for MS and they could pull a few things together. XBox, holo lens, and some other bits and pieces could make for a half decent experience. Apparently they are talking to magic leap about licensing some of their tech as well. But that's not going to happen overnight and a rush job is not going to be good enough here.

ako• 3 years ago

It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple has been working on this for more than 9 years. They know not to release until all parts are mature enough to make a successful release. Sometime the hardware just isn’t there yet, and you have to wait a few generation for it to be smaller/faster/have more pixels/use less energy. And even today it seems that hardware is not at a level where they can do a successful consumer release, so they have a pro version for markets that can work around the limitations of todays hardware, like the huge size of the goggles or the BOM cost.

mcintyre19944• 3 years ago

Related to his comment about the windows, I’m really curious how window management works in this. They’ve shown you can have multiple windows kinda in the space at the same time. But how do you rearrange them/move them around in space? How do you close them? Is there some way to put 2 apps next to each other in the same window, and keep them together when you move stuff around? I’m mostly curious because interacting with this stuff is still a mess on iPad, and the hand gestures they demoed for Vision Pro are a lot more limited than what we’ve seen with multitouch.

pocketarc• 3 years ago

The way it was presented seems to indicate that you can just set them wherever - if they don't move with you, then they'd have a physical position, right?

And for me, that sounds super exciting. Imagine going into a room and you have apps on the wall. You go into your home office, you have apps ready to go (picture a big status dashboard covering a wall, your music app to the left of your desk, stuff like that).

If it actually does work that way, that really is a whole new world.

mcintyre19944• 3 years ago

That's definitely really cool, but there must be a way to detach from that paradigm too for things like flights and hotel rooms, where you want the work/whatever to be wherever you are. And you'd still want to be able to rearrange the things in your home office room.

nullandvoid• 3 years ago

The primary input is eye tracking to me is really exciting, feels like the future.

I wonder what happens in games though. Will this not essentially be aimbot, looking at the target and then shoot?

jillesvangurp3• 3 years ago

I think Apple is doing smart things here with their software:

- leverage existing content means they won't have an empty room problem or a big "now what?!" moment for users after the novelty wears off. Without Steam, most existing VR platforms would be completely pointless. So far VR is for games and most of those are published on Steam. That's because most VR hardware vendors suck at software and end up outsourcing that to game studios. Meta included. Despite their ambitions, their goggles are mainly devices for running games not developed by Meta.

- a focus on the living room experience with a high end movie theater experience running, again, off existing content. Genius move because people already spend lots of money on home theaters. Some people buy 10K$ plasma screens even. This market is very real. Also, involving Disney with their huge back catalog of completely unmonetized 3D movies ... so obvious.

- Extend the highly successful IOS ecosystem to the new experience. They have tens of millions of apps already. And they'll work fine in AR. Why not do that?

The strategy is about content. It's the right strategy. The first generation hardware is of course amazing too and it will bootstrap a new generation of application developers that will be using Apple SDKs and tools to target all this with new content. But to bootstrap the ecosystem they need an audience.

Here too the strategy is genius: SDKs are based on things developers already use. They just co-announced a push into gaming for Mac along with some convenient porting kits for developers. That was just a footnote buried deep into the mac related announcements. But of course this means more content coming to AR as well. All that lovely content currently available via Steam.

Top to bottom the strategy is about compelling content. I think it's going to work.

This is not the final answer to AR but the opening salvo in a decades long push to completely own this space. Step 0 is to get millions of these things in the market with enough content to get people hooked and keep them consuming content. The rest will come later. It's appropriately radical, pragmatic, and conservative at the same time.

kristianc2• 3 years ago

If the strategy is fully about content (which would make this device about selling services on top of the Vision Pro), why is the Vision Pro specced as it is, and why is the price point so high?

The specification of the device seems to be complete overkill for the kind of strategy you are describing, which frankly does not need extreme hardware power, and makes it cost prohibitive to many of the people who would otherwise buy the content.

All I can think of is that there are lower specced and lower priced devices coming, but I am sort of at a loss as to why they didn’t start with those - as if this fails, they aren’t going to get off the ground.

jachee• 3 years ago

Yeah, this is the Vision Pro. That leaves room in Apple’s usual nomenclature for Vision Air, Vision Max, Vision Mini, Vision SE, and just plain Vision.

The high-end system spec is to ensure there’s no tethering requirement, thus the computer-class SoC in there.

Will help keep people from turning into Stephenson’s gargoyles. :)

jillesvangurp3• 3 years ago

It's specced the way it is to deliver the best in class, best possible content experience without compromises in initially small volumes. Neither of those things is an accident. Scaling up manufacturing is hard and expensive. Much easier to create a lot of hype for an expensive device that is going to be so popular that they won't be able to satisfy demand. So, they'll make lots of them and sell out in no time. The ebay value of these things is going to be insane.

By the way, this is a similar price point to the magic leap and holo lens devices. This just seems to be what it takes for a state of the art AR/MR experience.

And it's not like there is a shortage of very wealthy people buying things like Teslas, ipad pros, fully specced out iphones, that carry thousands of dollars worth of equipment. For those people 3500$ is just the right level of premium and exclusivity. Like it or not, Apple is very good at separating people like that from their cash. There are millions of them and most of them are already loyal customers. There is no need for a lower price point and there absolutely is no need to compromise on quality.

The goal isn't to make you happy but to make you crave something you can't afford yet. So, when the time comes you'll be spending a bit more than is comfortable for you. That's what Apple does. They leave the low margin scraps to others.

adrusi• 3 years ago

I see a lot of the pricey functionality they packed into this thing as about making it less onerous to put on. People need to actually decide to put it on to do stuff that they could do with their existing devices.

There's one unavoidable obstacle to people wanting to put on the headset: you're going to look really weird and isolated to other people in your environment. The tech to solve this problem doesn't exist, and maybe it's too high a barrier and this product category just isn't going to work. But Apple is betting that if they chip away at all the other reasons to not put on the headset, it'll cross the threshold where it wearing it becomes a regular routine for most people who buy one.

If they can bootstrap that into an ecosystem so that there's things you'll want to do with the device that you couldn't do with your other devices, at that point they can start selling a cheaper device that doesn't try to solve the onerousness problem through sheer luxury.

sebzim45005• 3 years ago

Maybe this is the minimum spec device that allows users to read text without getting nauseous?

matsemann• 3 years ago

If it is about content, why would everything still have to be "apps" in their walled garden? If they want content, allow people to freely use it to their liking and produce and innovate new things.

mellosouls• 3 years ago

It is very unfortunate the way that we see repeated claims here either implying or directly stating there is something revolutionary, besides the power (and matching price) without any acknowledgement of the existing space.

a focus on the living room experience with a high end movie theater experience running, again, off existing content. Genius move

Cool. Tell NReal and BigScreen that, they and others have already done it on Quest and other platforms. Nothing new here.

Without Steam, most existing VR platforms would be completely pointless. So far VR is for games and most of those are published on Steam.

Tell that to the many Quest users who have delighted in the wireless experience and superb exercise apps and other new vistas opened up to them in their existing platform, including remote working via services like Immersed. The latter can absolutely be boosted with the new specs the Vision Pro is bringing.

Look, this is a bold move by Apple, and I applaud it; I think it could give a welcome boost to the industry but please can we stop with the nonsense about them creating something that wasn't already there, or at least elaborate what it brings and improves with reference to the prior art.

That information - which I don't doubt is there, this is an exciting product - will be genuinely useful.

tommit• 3 years ago

It's the same song every time Apple releases a new product. Yes, bits and pieces have been present in a variety of already existing products, but there is simply no one single existing product you could compare this one to. And history has simply shown that Apple usually gets a lot of things right and is a main driver in mass adoption. I don't know if that's gonna be the case here, since it's still "a lot" to put on something intrusive like that on your face for most people, but it's just not right to compare it directly to a Quest or something.

Similarly, sure, maybe NReal and BigScreen have done something similar and were earlier in doing so. But they simply don't have the same audience Apple does. I get the frustration -- we shouldn't credit Apple as the sole inventor of all good things. But they are usually really good in stitching a lot of good things together and releasing them in a single product that usually turns out fairly successful.

Dalewyn2• 3 years ago

a focus on the living room experience with a high end movie theater experience

One of my biggest impressions watching Apple's trailer was that this paints a big target on televisions and home theater hardware in general.

If the experience is executed well, it would be much cheaper (yes, really) and easier and simpler to just get Apple's VR goggle instead of a TV and peripherals that will infuriate you.

Clearly we live in interesting times.

bbu• 3 years ago

I rarely watch tv all by myself. I couldn’t imagine but two, three or four of these devices and then sit on the couch with three other ppl in isolation.

esskay6• 3 years ago

Leveraging existing content from the iOS/macOS app store is going to be key I think. The "now what" is a common issue with the Quest. It's a fun little toy but once you realise they're charging AAA prices for what are essentially tech demos in many cases it becomes a bit of a hard sell.

That combined with Meta boasting "over 500 titles" like it's a good thing really do put into perspective just how devoid of content the quest really is.

jb19912• 3 years ago

I use quite a few Apple products every day of the last 10 years, and I’m very impressed with certainly all the technology and reviews and explanations of how this device works and what the user experience will be. However, this is the first Apple device that really makes me pause. All of the marketing material, the WWDC videos, all of it feels very uncomfortable to see all these people isolating themselves in a room with big goggles on. I find it really hard to comprehend this is the direction that technology is taking our lives. Imagine walking into a house, and a lot of the people are just sitting around by themselves in corners with goggles on. The whole thing just feels very strange and post apocalyptic to me.

And these 3D spacial moment recordings, imagine children growing up in a house where when something nice happens, the parent rushes to put on goggles and stare at them through them, their little virtual eyes displayed on the outside, it’s frankly creepy to me.

dwayne_dibley2• 3 years ago

I don't disagree, however when was the last time you walked into a room where at least one person wasn't solely focused on their phone.

The 3D photo thing is super weird, they could release a stand alone camera in future, BUT, I think this is a v1 product, imagine where it'll be in 5 years time, or an SE model which isn't wrap around. I already wear glasses so having AR glasses is no big leap.

mcny3• 3 years ago

I think this is a v1 product

This is exactly what I tell myself. This is equivalent to their five hundred dollar original iPhone with no App Store or even copy and paste functionality. I expect the SE to cost a third of this if not a fifth.

Edit: five hundred dollar iPhone typo

jb19912• 3 years ago

That's a good point, maybe eventually some of the tech will leak out and not actually require wearing the goggles.

Regarding phones, I see your point there too, but at least with phones people can still look up make eye contact, easily set the phone down when needing to interact with someone; unlike these, there is a definite wearing-them and not-wearing barrier that many will probably not cross on a whim, so we'll just get used to interacting with virtually projected eyeballs on the outside of them. Very strange to me.

nixpulvis• 3 years ago

We should be moving away from that not further into it though.

princevegeta89• 3 years ago

I don't see phone as being equivalent to a VR headset. Phone is just a few sq. inches of distraction whereas the VR stuff is a 360 degree false world full of delusion.

BulgarianIdiot2• 3 years ago

The 3D photo thing is super weird, they could release a stand alone camera in future

We can call it "iPhone"

divbzero• 3 years ago

Strapping on goggles to record a family moment feels super weird to me too. I wonder if future iPhones will have the sensors required to take 3D photos.

thih9• 3 years ago

they could release a stand alone camera in future

I would prefer a lens that could adapt an existing camera to 3d photography / video. Some already exist, like:

- Canon RF 5.2mm F2.8 L Dual Fisheye: https://www.dpreview.com/news/7991481617/canon-shows-first-f...

- Loreo 3D Lens 9005: https://www.oddcameras.com/loreo_3d_lens_9005.htm

lm284692• 3 years ago

however when was the last time you walked into a room where at least one person wasn't solely focused on their phone.

Do we want more of that ?

ricw• 3 years ago

Rather than releasing a stand alone camera, I’d expect the vision pro headset to act as one too. In other words I’d expect it to be able to take spatial pictures whilst not being worn. Less creepy, and more like taking a picture with your camera / phone.

bowsamic3• 3 years ago

however when was the last time you walked into a room where at least one person wasn't solely focused on their phone.

Yeah and that's really bad.

I have a friend who used to do this, even back when phones first started coming out. He couldn't resist just being on his phone, trying to talk to him was a nightmare.

piceas2• 3 years ago

I think it's weird because the example they used of the birthday is trying too hard to be family-friendly and social.

The HoloLens had some great examples of highlighting where to hit a mechanism to make it work. I have no idea if it was any good in reality.

That doesn't work for Apple, at least not for advertising.

I think it would have been neat to have shown a sports person/dancer/musician looking through the eyes of their instructor to correct their posture, etc. Or at least show them reviewing the recording together.

bsaul• 3 years ago

Agree. This was the first wwdc that really made me feel like apple's vision of the future is really not mine.

And made me question my work choice as an iOS user and developer, this time from an ethical perspective.

Dalewyn2• 3 years ago

And these 3D spacial moment recordings, imagine children growing up in a house where when something nice happens, the parent rushes to put on goggles and stare at them through them,

Isn't this what used to happen with camcorders and now with smartphones?

Hell, how many people watch live music events and the like in-person through a smartphone camera (assuming recording is okay)?

I understand where you're coming from, but it pays to take a step back and look at things from a wider and more fundamental perspective.

danielbln• 3 years ago

Apple's goal is surely to get away from the google form factor asap, and once we're at a pair of slick glasses I don't think you'd even think twice about it.

bluescrn• 3 years ago

It feels like another pretty Apple device which is purely for consuming content, and of little use for serious work (or serious play). And $3500 is way too much to pay for that sort of device.

A UI that relies entirely on eye tracking and arm motion tracking, without a single button for 'accept' or 'back' or 'fire' in the case of games seems incredibly limiting. They didn't demonstrate text entry, did they?

I expected to see Apple's headset being demonstrated as a product for professionals, perhaps for architects, product designers, and engineers to visualise their designs for clients. Maybe it could have also found a niche in education.

But no, they seem to have iPad-like use cases in mind, and for that, the price is way too high.

layer84• 3 years ago

That’s the fantasy vision, but I don’t see how it would be achievable within the next 15-20 years given the current technological outlook and considering the energy requirements and the necessary optical workings. It will require major technical breakthroughs that aren’t remotely on the horizon.

hparadiz• 3 years ago

I don't know if you've ever seen Serial Experiments Lain. In it the protagonist slowly descends into an underground of hackers while finding herself isolated in a room with all sorts of mid 90s aesthetic crt monitors, servers, tubes and wires. And that is more what my current office looks like as opposed to someone hanging out on a couch wearing this headset. If the user interface is to be believed you can in theory do real work with just your eyes and your voice to dictate. It got me thinking. What is really a dystopia? What if our current keyboard and mouse desktop setups, laptops, and displays are the real dystopia?

dddanmar• 3 years ago

Thank you for bringing Serial Experiments Lain back into my recent memory.

itsnotlupus• 3 years ago

Notably that show features a gargoyle who seems very proud to be walking the streets with all their cool hardware.

With the Vision Pro, Apple is going to let us become the prettiest gargoyle at the ball.

rpastuszak• 3 years ago

it the protagonist slowly descends into an underground of hackers while finding herself isolated in a room with all sorts of mid 90s aesthetic crt monitors, servers, tubes and wires.

My Meta account name is “regretbuy” (IIRC), but I love the menu scene in Superhot because it looks so similar to your description.

nonethewiser• 3 years ago

What if our current keyboard and mouse desktop setups, laptops, and displays are the real dystopia?

Im not following. Why would that be the dystopia?

sterlind• 3 years ago

there's a scene in Lain where a junkie is wandering around, wearing chunky AR goggles, haptic gloves and a backpack full of computer, festooned with cables, gibbering euphorically about how wired in he feels.

so the show portrays AR - at least in that setting - as almost degenerate.

of course, Lain has an unfair advantage in not really needing any kind of interface to live in the Wired.

chasd003• 3 years ago

Lain turned out to be an AI iirc

piceas2• 3 years ago

I'm hoping for more of a Dennou Coil future myself.

kiba• 3 years ago

The dystopia is corporate control and the lack of freedom to hack our device as we wish.

dangerwill• 3 years ago

So I just watched Serial Experiments Lain last weekend, and the wires are a strong aesthetic in the show, but that is not what the show is actually about. The horror at the heart of the show is about depersonalization caused by constantly being Connected to the subconscious of other people. It's a show about the fears of a constantly connected world brought on by the internet, not the user interface of that connection.

layer84• 3 years ago

I think the (standing-)desktop setup with keyboard, mouse, and monitor(s) is already close to the ergonomic optimum for any kind of work that is heavily text based (from Excel sheets to technical and prose writing to coding to email and chat, and forums like here), despite the ergonomic shortcomings that remain. (The one exception being pure reading or markup tasks, where tablet-style devices are great.) Our bodies haven’t really evolved for written communication, but it’s nevertheless still the most effective in many ways, given how our hands and eyes work. I don’t think there is any dystopia in it. Rather, we should embrace it for the many purposes it is effective for, and work to improve it within its paradigm, rather than chasing a fantasy of replacing it with somehow more intuitive or natural means, which generally turn out to only be good for casual or low-text use.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 3 years ago

Wearing a VR helmet at a family event is a big NO. I'd rather use a tech that would use footage from multiple cameras in the room, then build a sort of 3D-recording of some moment that I would be able to immerse myself in later, with full freedom of movement and pause-rewind.

Of course it would need some tech to fill in the blind zones obscured from cameras, but likely with generative AI and data from before and after the occlusion occurred such technology seems plausible.

cbm-vic-20• 3 years ago

Wearing a VR helmet at a family event is a big NO.

Imagine how that scene with the dad filming the kids playing would look if the kids had the Vision goggles on, too.

johnchristopher2• 3 years ago

i believe this is one of the reasons consumer VR hasn't taken off and likely won't: even if 5 people are in the same room it disconnects most people too much to be enjoyable on a regular basis. People would rather intuitively gravitate toward watching a netflix show or whatever than being bodily isolated and cut off for too long.

I haven't yet read/seen much about Apple's take on it so maybe they closed a gap I am not aware of.

And these 3D spacial moment recordings, imagine children growing up in a house where when something nice happens, the parent rushes to put on goggles and stare at them through them, their little virtual eyes displayed on the outside, it’s frankly creepy to me.

Well, I have always found that creepy, even with old analog camera from back then (but I always found adults staring at children when something nice happens a bit creepy (or cringe ?) so that's me).

moonchrome• 3 years ago

This is labeled a pro device. Their home use marketing really misses the mark IMO.

The fact that I can mute out the rest of the room while working is a plus not a minus.

I'm skeptical this will be there on a technical level to justify the price but the concept of working in VR is objectively an improvement, especially once you factor in the portability of the system.

For entertainment - it's probably going to be the same as computer games - everyone had one for work and it was expensive and awkward - but work drove adoption and people started playing games on it.

I think this is the main failure of VR so far, it's trying to force people into this alien experience just for entertainment. I have plenty of ways to play games/watch video, I probably wouldn't use it if I had it for free let alone paying large sum of money.

If I'm using VR day to day for work - then I might occasionally game on it - this is the road to widespread adoption.

rchaud3• 3 years ago

People already had computers for work. Nobody is going to have one of these sitting around for years until a Prince of Persia or Doom type game emerges.

Apple needs to build an app store for this and fast.

Cthulhu_• 3 years ago

It'll become accepted I'm sure, if it breaks through; could anyone have imagined walking into a living room 30 years ago [0] and seeing everyone hunched over a phone? Or 80 years ago and seeing everyone around a television?

I mean I get what you mean, but I also think that some things get normalized in subsequent generations. Our 15 year old and his gf have their phones out at all times, frequently switching to interacting, glancing at random videos, messaging, games, etc. Unthinkable 20 years ago, but for them it's tuesday.

That said, VR headsets have been a thing for a while now, at all price ranges; Google Cardboard and clones would make any smartphone into a rudimentary 3d headset, but as far as I know nobody normalized that into their daily life to e.g. watch videos. Head-mounted DVD players were a thing as well for a while I think, but again, never became normalized. Google Glass was the first 'big' AR system, and it was hated for being so obvious and its wearers being so blatant in glancing one way and having a camera aimed at you (which might have been recording) at all times; it might be interesting to see what today's iterations, Snapchat's Spectacles [1], Facebook / Ray Ban's Stories [2], Bose Frames or Amazon Echo Frames will do, I think they'll be much more accepted because they're not as obvious.

[0] I had to edit that one a few times, had to think about when mobile phones became daily use items

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/us/snapchat-spectacles-2-0,review-...

[2] https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/ray-ban-stories

landhar• 3 years ago

could anyone have imagined walking into a living room 30 years ago and seeing everyone hunched over a phone?

True, but I don't recall smartphones ever being unveiled with promotional videos of people all being hunched over them at dinner.

Smartphones were promoted by enabling us to do things on the go: making and receiving phone calls, getting directions, finding restaurants in the area. This is why this feels different: the experience that is promoted is one that feels already slightly dystopian.

2muchcoffeeman2• 3 years ago

There’s been backlash to being on phones all day. iOS even guilt trips you every week with stats. It even guilt trips you for being too sedentary. If anyone is going to guilt trip you for doing too much of something, probably apple.

rocketbop3• 3 years ago

could anyone have imagined walking into a living room 30 years ago [0] and seeing everyone hunched over a phone? Or 80 years ago and seeing everyone around a television?

True, but is it so different to be hunched over a phone than hunched over a book. You can still just look up and be present. With a headset, well… there isn’t such a parallel.

Maybe the Sony Walkman is a better comparison because finally you could go out in the world buffered from it.

bsenftner• 3 years ago

I was getting an economics graduate degree 20 years ago, and at that time we had economic reports describing the upward arc of mobile phones to be exactly what they became, with all the negative social issues we see today forecast with "we'll need to do something about this" repeated over and over. It was seen as the mechanism the "rest of the world" gets access to computers and the Internet.

dboreham2• 3 years ago

Yes people imagined that. There's a movie about the company General Magic where you will see people filmed at the time imagining just that.

CPLX4• 3 years ago

Seeing people hunched over watching the news isn't honestly that much of a stretch: https://twitter.com/HistoryInPics/status/411376204231753728?...

sanderjd9• 3 years ago

Our 15 year old and his gf have their phones out at all times, frequently switching to interacting, glancing at random videos, messaging, games, etc.

Yes, and this is a bad thing.

seydor2• 3 years ago

I dont think this is ever going to happen. Phones sell because they made computers unintrusive. This tech has some time go until it becomes as simple to wear as sunglasses or even less. IMHO something like a new google glass is more likely to win this space

samhuk• 3 years ago

Phones sell because they made computers unintrusive

Respectfully, how does this make any sense? Didn't mobile phones end up becoming the most intrusive technology on Earth? (I'm not sure what you specifically mean by "intrusive", but I'm assuming that you mean "the extent to which the object interrupts your life/tasks/etc.").

Phones sell because they are:

1. Convenient

2. In most civilizations on Earth, it became a necessary item in order to live (authentication, payments, maps, etc.).

I'll skip the lesser points, such as the fact that they took over the camera for >99% of people for 99% of the time.

Kiro• 3 years ago

My dream is to become a fully wired in cyborg. I thought many hackers felt the same but I guess not.

kensai• 3 years ago

I don't know if you are joking, but it is for many. Bar the wired part. Why not wireless?

ChuckNorris893• 3 years ago

Wake the f. up Samurai, we have a city to burn.

rchaud3• 3 years ago

Probably because being jacked in to what amounts to a $3500 Safari browser and an Apple amusement park feels less like Terminator's HUD and more like the guy in the Matrix that decided to believe he's enjoying eating an imaginary steak in an imaginary restaurant.

wslh• 3 years ago

I don't think this is much different of looking at people in the 90s SMSing all the time and what happened after that with smart phones, you can criticize what you are currently living. The VR/AR is just a normal, technical and market, evolution.

In the 80s people started using walkmans to hear their own music instead of listening in their living room with their family speakers.

I think that the social criticism starts much much earlier. Nothing special about Apple.

Another take, adding AI to the equation, is that probably the humanity ego is huge and all these stuff is harming it and we are not as important and intelligent as we thought. We are amazing creatures for sure and will fight for our humanity in the way other animals do for their survival.

justdep• 3 years ago

I imagine eventually your phone will be also able to do these spatial video recordings so the functionally on the headset will fade into the background as a fringe use for passively capturing something while you happened to have the headset on (and enjoying the spatial videos you captured with your phone)

sudhirj2• 3 years ago

This whole thing would have been much better if they’d positioned it as a work and personal entertainment machine, similar to a bunch of monitors with a Mac mini, and replacing iPads or single-viewer TVs.

By trying to show interactions with other people, it’s just highlights a weird isolation - what it’s not pointing it out is that the advantage for people like me who work in a private home office where I’m already isolated - this just helps me work there better. I don’t have to cram my small table with monitors any more, and when I do watch a movie or show there I can do it on a giant screen.

Even the cameras could have been highlighted much better, either by photographing a complex machine, or an art collaboration across countries.

thoradam• 3 years ago

This whole thing would have been much better if they’d positioned it as a work and personal entertainment machine

Honestly most of the presentation had this exact vibe for me. That the Vision Pro is directly positioned as a device for deep immersion, like movies, gaming, and engrossing work. The two exceptions I remember were those moments where a person plopped their Vision Pro on to take a 3D moment of their children and the one where a person answered a FaceTime call with the Vision Pro while packing their suitcase. I don't see those moments happening in reality with this sort of device.

personlurking• 3 years ago

similar to a bunch of monitors with a Mac mini, and replacing iPads or single-viewer TVs.

Except the Vision Pro maps your home, visually and acoustically. I suppose it's acceptable if one already has a Roomba and an Alexa.

whywhywhywhy3• 3 years ago

The video call virtual avatar literally looks like a reanimated corpse. Like honestly if you were directing a sci fi movie where you were talking to a brain in a tank “that doesn’t know he’s dead yet” that’s how you’d art direct it.

Can see it becoming a faux pas to answer a video call as the creepy avatar.

I know Zuck got clowned on for the horizon avatars but at least they were just lame and low quality, not outright creepy/gross.

maaaaattttt• 3 years ago

The 3D spacial capture will ne done on the iPhone in one or 2 generations. I would bet a lot of money on that. That way Apple’s almost certain that all Vision Pro owners will upgrade their phones. They just couldn’t show it captured that way yet as it’s not yet available on the iPhone.

brookst4• 3 years ago

iPhones have had lidar for years.

linsomniac2• 3 years ago

I imagine a future iPhone will be able to record Vision enabled content. I imagine you might be able to just set the Vision Pro on the table while it's recording and you do your thing.

amelius2• 3 years ago

Eh, the iPhone already isolated us from our surroundings. This is the next step.

jstanley• 3 years ago

You're taking a backwards-looking view of this.

Imagine if ancient man, living in the woods, saw people of today living in cities. "It feels very uncomfortable seeing all of these people isolating themselves inside buildings".

In fact the very opposite is the case. Now, we go into nature to isolate ourselves.

In the future, going into virtual reality will be where you go to interact with others, and you'll take the goggles off to isolate yourself.

There are enormous advantages to living (as much as possible of) your life in VR:

- your home can be arbitrarily large at zero cost and without taking any land away from anyone else

- you can change the decor whenever you want at zero cost

- you can paint walls as ornately as you like, at zero cost, immediately, without even any prep work required

- you spend zero time on travelling

- you can instantly hang out with friends in foreign countries for free without even needing a visa

As long as the technology is good enough (and please remember that qualifier, because people normally respond with an implicit assumption that the technology is not good enough) - as long as the technology is good enough VR is strictly better than current reality.

siva7• 3 years ago

You forgot the /s (i hope).

CPLX4• 3 years ago

people normally respond with an implicit assumption that the technology is not good enough

Because it's not good enough and there's no real plausible means by which it will be good enough.

I mean this was a core argument in the Matrix, and many agreed that it wasn't worth doing even when the virtual reality was absolutely flawless and a land of limitless bounty.

And there's no tech in progress that has a path to that kind of immersive experience. Even if that kind of thing is possible which I have doubts about my great-grand-children will be long dead by the time it shows up.

You're not going to hang out with friends in foreign countries for free you're going to be isolated in your house with a piece of plastic on your face.

jdhzzz• 3 years ago

We'll make cars so cheap only the rich can afford horses. We'll make air travel so cheap, only the rich can afford travel by ship. We'll make AR/VR so compelling only the rich can afford travel.

DonaldPShimoda• 3 years ago

Asimov kind-of wrote about this phenomenon in 1956's "The Naked Sun", the second of his Elijah Bailey series. I won't give plot spoilers, but the main connection is that a group of people on another planet have grown accustomed to virtual holographic "viewing" being the main mode of interacting with other people, while physically being in their presence is deemed unwholesome, embarrassing, or otherwise uncouth, causing people to go to great extents to avoid it.

I don't know that Vision Pro is necessarily taking us on that sort of path; I'll probably hold my judgment until they've proliferated enough that I actually know someone who has one. But your point that the virtual world is becoming where we go to interact with other people while physical spaces are used for individual isolation is a good one, and my contribution here is to tie it to a book that is over 65 years old to show that it's not even a particularly new idea.

freedrock87• 3 years ago

Your proving his point of the dystopia

woile• 3 years ago

I wonder what impacts this might have in mental and physical health of people

DrThunder2• 3 years ago

Wow..... I have to completely disagree with you and feel quite sorry that's the way you feel about your life. You sound similar to the Japanse Hikikomori men that I read about.

1. People do not really go into nature to "isolate" themselves. As you said, you can do that in your own house. There's a plethora of reason nature is good for.

2. Everything else you're listing as "advantages" are less equivalents of what can be done in real life already.

3. Hanging out with friends virtually is no where near the same emotionally or physically. This has been scientifically proven. You NEED to be talking to people in person and interacting with them. Otherwise, you will be emotionally stunted.

sanderjd9• 3 years ago

In the future, going into virtual reality will be where you go to interact with others, and you'll take the goggles off to isolate yourself.

This sounds deeply shitty.

stcroixx• 3 years ago

Weren’t they trying to sell high priced virtual real estate in the metaverse next to snoop dog? Would decor not be monetized just like skins and items in gaming?

lolinder7• 3 years ago

I would argue that the ancient man living in the woods is absolutely right about cities—a person in a concrete jungle is dangerously isolated from reality. We know the negative effects of too little sunlight, we know the positive effects of exposure to nature. We know the negative environmental effects of the infrastructure that makes the concrete jungle possible, but those effects are invisible to the resident of the jungle.

Also, it's pretty clear that cities are too large for our social apparatus. The ancient man living in a tribe has a deeper personal connection with his fellow villagers than anything we develop in a city, much less in the worldwide city we call the internet.

Given all that, I think it's reasonable to take a backwards-looking approach to this. Evolution happens on the time scale of millennia, and our biology has had only had a few hundred years to adjust to the modern city. Rushing headlong along the same path into full, always-connected VR is hazardous.

gherkinnn• 3 years ago

Imagine if ancient man, living in the woods, saw people of today living in cities. "It feels very uncomfortable seeing all of these people isolating themselves inside buildings".

Forest man is on to something. Can I live in his family’s hovel and keep my antibiotics? Thanks.

johncalvinyoung2• 3 years ago

If this is the future I do not want to live in it. No VR is ever going to match the actual experience of travelling to a place unlike any you've ever been. No emulated persona is ever going to match looking into a loved one's eyes. I can see the benefits of AR/VR for productivity or for niche consumption, but it could be 'strictly better than current reality' only with the narrowest of cherrypicked definitions. No thanks.

funkykong• 3 years ago

I can't tell if you're trolling or not...

lern_too_spel• 3 years ago

No, this idea was stupid when Zuckerberg promoted it, and it's still stupid with Cook promoting it. VR goggles are a dead end. Invisible VR or AR has lots of applications, but the technology is years away.

jorisg• 3 years ago

Your comment is such a great bait :D As much as things could be really cool in VR, the simplest argument here is that as a human you can do much more than just look at things and listen to things...

alexvoda11• 3 years ago

There are enormous advantages to living (as much as possible of) your life in VR:
- your home can be arbitrarily large at zero cost and without taking any land away from anyone else

Except it isn't.

- you can change the decor whenever you want at zero cost

Except you can't.

- you can paint walls as ornately as you like, at zero cost, immediately, without even any prep work required

Except you can't.

- you spend zero time on travelling

Except you don't.

- you can instantly hang out with friends in foreign countries for free without even needing a visa

Except you don't.

This is an incredibly dystopian view.

Let's not kid ourselves that VR will not be monetized to the breaking point just like any other platform. Enshitification is inevitable.

In other words, corporations will do what they already do, sell lies, create demand for those lies and in exchange demand more of the irreplaceable things like time, land and resources.

OOPMan• 3 years ago

As long as the technology is good enough...but it's not, so quit shilling

esafak• 3 years ago

You omitted my favorite use case: reducing commuting and business travel.

mouzogu• 3 years ago

the mental gymnastics people are using to justify dropping $3500 on this is amazing

simonh• 3 years ago

Imagine if ancient man, living in the woods, saw people of today living in cities. "It feels very uncomfortable seeing all of these people isolating themselves inside buildings".

A city is literally millions of people all wanting to live in the same place to be close to other people. I couldn't wait to move from the countryside to a city in order to be near more people like myself.

Communications technology is great, it helps me connect with even more people with common interests, as right now, and with my family while we are apart. It is in no way shape or form a substitute for being physically with people. There's something primally satisfying and emotionally anchoring about actually being together. That's why online discussions can so easily escalate into verbal knife fights and abuse. It's emotionally disconnected and I suspect the same will be true of VR.

MagicMoonlight• 3 years ago

He says as he sits alone in his room on a computer…

underdeserver• 3 years ago

In short, using a Vision Pro is only going to be reasonable if everyone in the room has one and is using it.

bitcoin_anon• 3 years ago

My wife an I use Airpods in the home when we're doing chores, and I'm already starting to feel uncomfortable about that. I feel annoyed when I'm interrupted from a podcast by a family member, and I'm sure they feel it. Perhaps that will lead them to talk with me less in the future.

The technology is siphoning attention from the home. Humans are highly visual creatures. The impact of this product will probably be greater.

tfandango• 3 years ago

I agree with you, not sure why they included that use case in the demo. It would have been better done if the dad recorded the 3d video with iPhone depth sensors (possible?) and replayed it later in VR.

I really like my Quest 2. But these devices are for when you are alone. I work alone and would love to use something that expands my workspace and provides a comfortable environment to concentrate in. Quest 2 can't really get there. And occasionally I find people to talk to in VR which is enjoyable. But when the family is home it makes 0 sense. I cannot imagine us all sitting in an empty room with goggles on, watching the same thing.

62951413• 3 years ago

Once upon a time we laughed at the Back To The Future Part II's "Pizza Time" scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8oS4VbRaAA). I guess we are in the future now.

baxtr• 3 years ago

I’m in the same camp. There is one thing you and I have to admit though: people already live disconnected lives, staring at their phones and other screens all day long. People dining out together look at their phone while wearing AirPods. The direction was set years ago.

theonlybutlet• 3 years ago

Honestly you could replace everything you said there with an iPhone and it'd still apply.

gofreddygo• 3 years ago

There are 3 things that standout about apple's vision product line.

First there's technology. This is clearly better than anything else in the market. Enough has been said on this.

Then there's usability and market. There's no real trojan horse feature that will get this product mainstream right now. Apple's hope is that the dev community will either build one or users will point them in the right direction with usage stats and telemetry. Maybe they will, or they won't nobody knows.

Finally there's the future. I see people comparing this to previous apple products and their past experiences with them etc. There appears to be two factions here, one that says "This is the future I want and I love it", and the other saying "This is the future I don't want and hate it". Both groups however are saying one common thing ... "this is the future". And that's pretty much Apple's bet.

pflenker• 3 years ago

The vision pro showcases one use case which is compelling enough to make me consider buying it (in a couple of years, when it’s more settled): As a replacement for a monitor for work. Seriously, having a huge monitor everywhere is a game changer for me.

smelendez• 3 years ago

I agree this is the compelling use case. The benefit of a big monitor without having to devote space to it, and on the go.

Also, a private monitor where nobody can look over your shoulder, which is a game changer for doing any kind of sensitive work or personal business in a public or shared space.

gampleman• 3 years ago

It's a strange time to be releasing this product. Not from a technological perspective (clearly the hardware Apple managed to put together is extremely impressive and they seem to believe that it finally got good enough to have real appeal albeit at a rather hefty price), but from a political perspective.

It seems like the last few years have generally had a technological backlash with worries about both invasive spying and surveillance capitalism on the one hand and mental health issues (especially in teens) sprouting on the other.

So it seems strange to react to all that by offering a product that glues a computer straight on your eyeballs. Now of course Meta has already been going down that road, but let's just say that company doesn't have much to loose in the reputation department.

To be fair, Apple seems to have made a few interesting design choices. They seem to have gone out of their way to create an illusion of two way transparency to their headset making casual human communication at least theoretically possible (although how much conversation you can have with someone actually wearing these due to distraction is an open question - if it's like trying to talk to someone on their phone that it will be at best half their attention).

ftxbro• 3 years ago

"Something in the Apple omertà makes me uncomfortable naming my collaborators as I normally would, even as I discuss the project itself."

I don't understand this. It's things they made them sign? I saw another article saying they make them sign a promise to not show they are wearing the headset, allegedly because they might look like huge dorks and cause brand risk.

elif• 3 years ago

I'm about 90% sold but I'd love to have someone's experience using it as an emacs terminal for coding.

As long as it doesn't get sweaty or nauseating after 30 minutes, I would still be content with it as a glorified monitor, not needing new UI paradigms or gesture controls.

Distraction-free huge monitor computing anywhere in the world is a huge advantage over laptops imo.

tromp2• 3 years ago

the amazing power of the iPhone map is that I can fly to Tokyo with no plans and have a great time, no stress.

Figuring out how you're going to get mobile data access in a foreign country without being charged through the nose does feel somewhat stressful...

sebzim45005• 3 years ago

Even the most scammy carrier isn't going to charge you an amount that is significant compared to the cost of the holiday. If you want to plan ahead to figure out how to get it cheap than go ahead, but it certainly isn't worth ruining your holiday over once you are there.

nickpp• 3 years ago

Airalo app allows me to buy an eSIM for Japan in the comfort of my home. Starting at $5 for 1GB and 1 week.

ganesh7• 3 years ago

Every day another submission about these goggles nobody seems to like. I'm just annoyed by all that unwarranted attention. Just because it's Apple.

lewisflude• 3 years ago

Anecdotally I like them, and not just because it's Apple, seems like great hardware/software/industrial design etc.

But valid to be annoyed at it, Apple do tend to be quite polarising for people.

sw104• 3 years ago

Has anything been said about how the eye-display proximity might affect vision?

Maybe this is a better time than ever to start a new opticians.

dboreham2• 3 years ago

VR has been "just about to become mainstream" my entire career. I'm quite old now. Perhaps it'll break through before I retire.

That said, the same thing was true about video phones, to the point that everyone assumed humans do not need to see each other on a phone call. Then we had a pandemic and things changed.

whywhywhywhy3• 3 years ago

Hit me this morning they never showed anyone working with files.

Can’t believe after the failed attempts to kill files on iPhone and iPad they’ve learned nothing and still think we can pretend a professional work tool can exist without a proper file system.

Not saying it should have desktop icons strewn across your living room, just that the “files siloed in apps transferring via share buttons” iPad model is objectively productivity hell and puts mental load menu fumbling where MacOS is instinctive drag and drop.

hoytschermerhrn• 3 years ago

You’ve posted a 3-paragraph rant on a baseless assumption for a product which hasn’t been released yet. Let’s all withhold judgement until we have more information about how this truly works.

MikaEfrat• 3 years ago

One of the WWDC developer videos shows the Files app icon around 10 minutes in: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10203/

whywhywhywhy3• 3 years ago

Files app is a crutch and a band aid to solve the problem of not building a file centric interface to begin with.

If it's anything like iOS/iPadOS it just doesn't work for getting work done or keeping projects organized, buildable upon and sane.

wouldbecouldbe• 3 years ago

Yeah projecting they eyes is such a stretch, seems to suggest they think we really will hangout with eachother while having the goggles on. Maybe they are right in the end, but weird. Same with the cameras displaying the world instead of using the eyes. Interesting choice, but also a big bet.

uxp100• 3 years ago

Interesting to read that the iOS 7 depth/parallax effect was tried all over the UI. It makes sense to indicate interactivity in a better way, but probably the right call to ditch that.

amelius2• 3 years ago

The hardware seems faintly unbelievable—a computer as powerful as Apple’s current mid-tier laptops (M2)

So I take it that you can basically leave your laptop home and take your Vision visor with you and work from a virtual environment?

dav_Oz• 3 years ago

I dig his vision of huge, persistent infospaces after all the "method of loci" [0] is a very effective and well described mnemonic device at least since antiquity.

The basic observation: It takes very little effort and exposure to remember places (spatial information) in contrast to taking in linear heavy processed information from writing and numbers (e.g. "facts").

Combine these two and you have a powerful way navigating through the information space itself.

If you look at it, we are confined to rectangular boxes, fancy interactive books enhanced by moving pictures, audio and some very limited tactile feedback but nevertheless bound by the superstructure of a static tiny detail in our overall spatial awareness.

Of course we are now so used to the endless iterations of rectangular boxes that we are extraordinarily proficient at extracting a lot of richness/information from that: in scrolling, clicking, typing, imagining ... I'm reminded by the scene of "The Matrix" where Cipher let Neo glimpse the Matrix code on his screens: "You get used to it, I don't even see the code. All I see is blond, brunette, redhead."[1]

IIRC once a 50s western movie was shown to a rural "test" public from the Eurasian steppe some of who saw a moving picture for the very first time. The reactions were mostly enthusiastic during slow "panorama shots" but the audience reacted very agitated in "close-ups" or "medium shots" where e.g. in the heat of the action the horse's legs were "cut off".

We take it as given that we learn the language of movies and find them at times 'realistic' and 'immersive' when in fact contrasted to 'reality' itself qbit by qbit they are basically - with some rounding error - as highly processed as books and thereby rely heavily on our imagination filling the gaps.

While we are on the subject of of naïve visions, another area which isn't appreciated enough imho is the immense dexterity of our hands as with "vision processing" the devices themselves are glued on our dexterity of "exact" and "repetitive" moves, there is too little wiggle room for organic experimenting, refining and expression like one would naturally do for a musical instrument.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

[1]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MvEXkd3O2ow

generalizations2• 3 years ago

I dig his vision of huge, persistent infospaces

This is immediately where I went as well. Been hoping for something like this since the first few iterations of VR tech. I can imagine that will become one of the 'killer apps' of this platform. Unfortunately, he also said it might take some iterations on their windowing system.

8jef• 3 years ago

To me, Apple Vision vision's, so-called spacial computing, is exactly what I was always looking for in a portable computing device: beefy processor, pixeless experience, app and file navigation using natural eyes and hands movement. This has the potential of replacing all desktop, laptop and tablet I may own.

Now I just have to wait for a Linux compatible version.

Because there's no way I'm gonna use any Apple software as if it was twenty five years ago, before iTunes insanities and whatever happened since. NFW.

generalizations2• 3 years ago

Now I just have to wait for a Linux compatible version.

That'll probably be about 15-20 years. Apple will have to prove that their interfaces work, and the rest of the industry will have to follow, and hardware will have to be hacked, and new paradigms built, and eventually -- maybe -- it'll be possible to do a non-janky version of this on linux. But the UX is paramount here, and linux is notoriously bad at that.

zaptrem5• 3 years ago

I think VisionOS apps can spawn multiple windows, so you could just spin up a fancy Remote Desktop app that serves Wayland windows and snaps the mouse to whichever window you're looking at.

coryfklein• 3 years ago

Side note unrelated to Apple Vision:

Why would anyone want text fully aligned to the left of the browser window?! At least it's distinctive, I don't think I've ever seen that on any other website in the last 15 years.

fio_ini2• 3 years ago

I cant stop thinking about how cool it will be to finally remove all these monitors and wires from my desk. Operating inside of a virtual space has an amazing appeal to me to de clutter desk and office space area. Scale screens bigger and smaller and not be confined to: tight windows, bringing in more physical screens, setting them all up, switching between work spaces with hotkeys. Even the virtual workspace on a single physical screen uses extra mental RAM capacity to always be remembering which space the tabs are and where. This evolution frees up my neck, my posture, minus the bit of weight on my head, I can be sitting or standing. This next development from this company I'm connected to seems to go to such a more natural way of thinking about and interacting with our computing space. Besides all the great human side of it's value added, this headset is tangible for me because it's connected to an ecosystem that I'm part of. If I were to get a Quest for example, now what? I'm connected to Facebook? Great... The price for Apple Vision is pretty high but damn it's a pretty amazing piece of technology, and blows most other major headsets out of the water, there's over 20 million pixels for each eye for God's sake. The amount of virtual real estate we're talking about is like walls of 4k screens all wired together throughout your house a hundred different HDMI/DVI/DisplayPort Adapters to GPUs, what a freakin nightmare that would be. Easily all costing well over $3.5k.

nerdbert2• 3 years ago

I'd like to connect this thing to a drone and go flying.

xenolith234• 3 years ago

I too was wondering if it could act as DJI's FPV helmet.

cudgy• 3 years ago

“… you won’t be confined to “a tiny black rectangle”. You’ll use all the apps you already use. You don’t have to wait for developers to adapt them. This is not a someday-maybe tech demo of a future paradigm; it’s (mostly) today’s paradigm, transliterated to new display and input technology.“

This is why I think this device will be different than its predecessors. There are practical reasons to buy it … assuming you can use it without getting sick or strained.

Notes on Vision Pro

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